Comuniști din România în arhiva Cominternului
Romanian Communists in the Comintern Archive

Vanda Nicolski and the Romanian emigration in U.S.S.R. during the Great Terror, 1936-1938, I

Summary/Abstract: In order to better introduce the published documents, I largely explained the broader context which encompass the moment when they were written. Vanda Nicolski, a major leader of the Communist Party of Romania, a member of the Central Committee and of the Political Bureau during the ‘30s, wrote two large reports in June and August 1938, when she was in Moscow. Clearly, her confessions, written during the Great Terror, weren’t innocent pieces of evidence scrutinizing the history of the C.P.o.R. per se, but they were meant to incriminate as many professional revolutionaries as possible. I tried to explain what stood behind her statement. The contents exposed by Vanda Nicolski refers mostly to the complex and fluid relationships established into the Party inner circle during Al. Daneliuk-Ștefansky’s mandate as general secretary of the C.P.o.R., which overlaps mostly the Great Depression.The author also provides a lot of details regarding the policies put in place by the communist establishment, from Moscow, but from Romania too, in order to borrow the main features requested by Comintern in its so called „third period“. For instance, details from the inner party circle regarding the Grivița strike from 1933 could be very useful for any future discussion about one of the most important upheavals in Romania’s XXth century history.

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